This poem contains no content warnings other than a non-explicit mention of sex. It was written on the 30th March 2022 and I am, to be honest, pretty pleased with it, even if I'm not 100% settled on the title.
Space:
I’ve always been terrified of space.Not as a general concept, nor one specificthing – more like a dozen things, one afteranother. The idea of being trapped insidea rocket ship haunted my childhood nightmares,all lights and noise and bellowed instructionsfrom an unseen advisor speaking a languageI did not understand;black holes consumed me with the sameobsession normally reserved by children forquicksand, waiting for one to appearin the sky above my head the way onemight be certain there are invisible sharksin any swimming pool;the idea, simply and most terrifying of all,of drifting through the infinite, nowhere to goand nothing to hold onto, nothing to use topull myself back down to the planet, condemnedto millennia of the void.As much as I loved to look at the stars, the ideaof being among them brought no comfort. I hadto stop staring at them for years at one point,so certain did I become every time I turnedmy eyes skyward that I could feel gravity givingup on me, surrendering me to that blacksky, offering me like a sacrifice to keep everyoneelse down to Earth.We were both adrift in the void when ouroutstretched hands brushed each other, our fingersquickly intertwining clumsy through the glovesof our spacesuits, the same instinct thatgives babies the strength to hang from washing lines,that makes newborn monkeys cling to their mother’sfur as they swing a mile above the unforgivingground. We knew that we were not in this journeytogether from hereon, that whatever our unknowndestinations, this was merely a pretty diversionamongst the stars. If candlelight is romantic,what can being in the same sky that stargazersstare into do?We danced for a moment, hand-in-hand, usingeach other’s momentum to enact a spin that hadmore purpose than any movement we had beenable to make in months. You laughed at somejoke only you could hear; I said you were cutewhen you laughed, staring into my reflectionin the impassive glass of your helmet.We both told lies for a little while, well awareof what we were doing while we slid them inbetween promises that we would be morehonest than we had ever been before.I knew that you could not be telling the truthboth when you said,I couldn’t bear to see you with someone else,and, I think we should keep seeing other people,but I nodded and agreed politely alongwith the hum of the life support inmy spacesuit, running calculations on howmuch oxygen I had left.We pretended to kiss, our helmets clangingsoftly together with the sound of a childknocking on the glass of an aquarium. Iimagined the sign next to the tank,quickly glanced over out of politeness by gueststhen abandoned in favour of more impressiveviewing: The North Pacific Train Wreck.Habitat: the bathypelagic, or midnight, zone.Diet: scavenged detritus. Conservation status:critically endangered.When it was polite, we engaged ina pantomime of coitus, not actuallytrying to share the atmosphere insideour suits at all, but going through the motionsof it. I did not take my socks off(of course not – how would one evenget them off from inside a spacesuit?)and I’m sure you, equally, broke some ofyour own personal rules around the wholeaffair. We both agreed that we did notknow what we wantedbut that this had been nice, we should dothis again sometime. And then, after checkingour watches and mumbling abouthaving somewhere to be, we gently let go,both of us pretending it was not terrifyingto be adrift and alone in the infinite voidagain, both of us well aware we hadtoo much tendency to cling on like babymonkeys to things that were not good for us.I called out that I hopedto see you again sometime, perhapsin orbit around some distant star; we weremoving in opposite directions again, andI pretended to not know that the onlyway you would swing back around to me wasif you found someone else’s momentumto spin with. I do not know what you calledback or what you secretly hoped and pretendednot to know, because I had bigger blackholes to worry about. So I went backto gazing at the stars around me, findingfreedom for the first time in the realisationthat nothing worse could happen when gravityhad already given me up.
[Image ID: a digital painting of two astronauts holding hands and dancing in a starry space scene, with orange, purple, and blue tones. The stars are reflected in their helmets. There is a glass sheen over them and they are surrounded by a bronze border and dark wall with a bronze plaque, making it appear that they are behind the glass in an aquarium. In the foreground is the silhouette of a young girl knocking on the glass. End ID]
